Benghazi ARB Report Released; Finds Fault, Calls For More Resources

The Department released the unclassified version of the Benghazi Accountability Review Board report tonight. You can read it here.

Many of the report's recommendations come down to calling on Congress to provide more funding for security personnel and secure facilities. See this key paragraph from the report's introduction:

For many years the State Department has been engaged in a struggle to obtain the resources necessary to carry out its work, with varying degrees of success. This has brought about a deep sense of the importance of husbanding resources to meet the highest priorities, laudable in the extreme in any government department. But it has also had the effect of conditioning a few State Department managers to favor restricting the use of resources as a general orientation. There is no easy way to cut through this Gordian knot, all the more so as budgetary austerity looms large ahead. At the same time, it is imperative for the State Department to be mission-driven, rather than resource-constrained – particularly when being present in increasingly risky areas of the world is integral to U.S. national security. The recommendations in this report attempt to grapple with these issues and err on the side of increased attention to prioritization and to fuller support for people and facilities engaged in working in high risk, high threat areas. The solution requires a more serious and sustained commitment from Congress to support State Department needs, which, in total, constitute a small percentage both of the full national budget and that spent for national security. One overall conclusion in this report is that Congress must do its part to meet this challenge and provide necessary resources to the State Department to address security risks and meet mission imperatives.

The report's harshest criticism of the Department comes in two of its findings, this one:

Systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department (the “Department”) resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.

... and this one:

The Board found that certain senior State Department officials within two bureaus demonstrated a lack of proactive leadership and management ability in their responses to security concerns posed by Special Mission Benghazi, given the deteriorating threat environment and the lack of reliable host government protection. However, the Board did not find reasonable cause to determine that any individual U.S. government employee breached his or her duty.

There is a lot to absorb. More to come tomorrow.

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Good Questions About Tunis, Khartoum, and Sana'a

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I'll say this for the Benghazi Accountability Review Board - it is doing a great job of maintaining the secrecy of its proceedings. I don't think the least hint about its deliberations has leaked out into the public sphere. We'll just have to wait for the report, assuming it is publicly released.

In the meantime, please read Diplopundit's post of earlier today because it contains a good many excellent and extremely pertinent questions about what lessons we have learned from the other serious attacks of last September. I partially quote from a few of them below, because they go directly to the premises that underlie some of our overseas physical security practices (which, for the record, are described pretty well in GAO reports like this one).

• If a mob can scale 9-foot walls that easily, and help from host country authorities are slow or not forthcoming, what are the recommended options for the embassy staff short of getting into a safehaven and waiting to be roasted like ducks?

In the event we cannot expect a timely response from host country authorities, I can imagine extreme circumstances under which it would be preferable to evacuate the mission, even during an attack, rather than to go into the safehaven.

• If the safehaven rooms are to function as the embassy’s “safe haven” for employees under attack, shouldn’t these rooms require not only fireproofing but also be fully smoke sealed?

That GAO report I linked to above describes "five key Overseas Security Policy Board standards to protect overseas diplomatic office facilities against terrorism and other dangers" but none of them address fire and smoke used as a weapon. Maybe the OSPB should think about that.

• Is it more advantageous to continue the path of co-location of facilities and other agencies inside one hardened facility (and provide a single target) or does the policy of co-location provide more vulnerabilities than acceptable?

Is it better to put all your eggs in one basket, or to spread the risk by distributing them in several baskets? The only answer I've ever heard that makes sense to me is this: in places where the host government provides reasonable security, distribute your eggs in several baskets; in places where it doesn't, put your eggs in one basket and use all your resources to protect that basket.

• How did the protesters easily got on top of the chancery buildings? Were these buildings constructed with built- in ladders? If so, is it time to revisit this and if the built-in ladders are there for “aesthetics” maybe it is time to screw that? As a precaution, what has been done to the current buildings constructed with built in ladders?

The embassy in Tunis did indeed have what amounted to built-in ladders (evidently vertical window stacks running from ground to roof with hand- and foot-holds wide enough to climb).

According to a definitive source of publicly available information, New Embassy Tunis completed construction on November 1, 2002, which means that it predates by one year the Office of Overseas Buildings Operations era of standard embassy designs. So, at least that architectural ladder wasn't reproduced elsewhere. On the other hand, that means the ladder was there for ten years with no action taken to remove it. Hum.  

The Stairway to Heaven was a good song, if a bit slow to get started, but it is really bad defensive architecture.

• Has the State Department updated its use of force policy since the embassy attacks? If so, what red lines require the corresponding response of active use of force?

Assuming (1) we cannot expect a host country intervention for many hours, if ever, and (2) that we may have to evacuate the compound while under attack, and (3) that fire may be used as a weapon ... that adds up to a need to use deadly force in unprecedented ways.

That's a lot of good questions.

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CG Dubai Moves To More Horizontal Surroundings

Consulate General Dubai used to be embedded in a small part of this high-rise office tower, which I believe is the largest and most populous in the Middle East. But now, CG Dubai has its own nice, new, secure and sustainable Fortress inside Dubai's diplomatic enclave.

U.S. Dedicates New Consulate Compound in Dubai, United Arab Emirates:

The multi-building complex, featuring a Consulate Office Building with an interior atrium and a multimedia center, has quickly become a platform to increase U.S. interaction with the Emirati people. The Consulate’s permanent art collection celebrates the exchange of artistic expression between the United States and the UAE through work by contemporary Emirati, American, and regional artists, curated by OBO’s Office of Art in Embassies. Occupying a six-acre site in the heart of Dubai’s diplomatic enclave on the Dubai Creek, the new facility creates a secure, sustainable, and pleasant workplace for approximately 280 employees.

The new Consulate incorporates numerous sustainable features, most notably solar hot water as well as zero use of potable water for irrigation. The facility is registered with the Green Building Certification Institute and is entering the formal review process with enough credits to earn a LEED Gold rating. B.L. Harbert International of Birmingham, Alabama constructed the project, which was designed by Page Southerland Page of Arlington, Virginia. The $147 million project generated jobs in both the United States and UAE.

I notice that OBO and the post have managed to keep photos of the completed new facility off of the internets, for now. If you're curious about what the new place looks like, you can view pastel watercolor artist renderings full of smiling people - a major part of every architect's portfolio - here. A new embassy or consulate never looks as good in real life as it does in those pretty paintings, so take what you see there and dial it down about 20%.

The press release goes on to note:

Since the 1999 enactment of the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act, the Department has moved more than 26,000 people into safer facilities. OBO has completed 87 diplomatic facilities and has an additional 41 projects in design or construction.

You can see photos of those completed new facilities here on OBO's website, in a sort of Fortress Embassies On Parade slideshow.

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American Centers vs Fortress Embassies

Photo - The Archer K. Blood American Center Library at the American Center, Dhaka, Bangladesh (from Embassy website)

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H/T to John Brown's Press and Blog Review for posting a link to the agenda transcript for the May 2011 Public Meeting of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

Check the date of that meeting - May 2011. And yet the transcript was only released a couple days ago. Did it take that long to clear the publication? Better late than never.

One part of the transcript piqued my own personal special interest. In the presentation by Ms. Betsy Whitaker, Strategic Communications Officer, Office of the Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, she remarked on the ongoing attempts to maintain some public diplomacy outreach facilities outside of the Department's famously forbidding Fortress Embassies:

American Spaces are clearly an area of great importance to generations of public diplomacy officers, and platforms of course that can be used sometimes as a sort of politically neutral venue where people can gather and simply learn about the United States through a variety of different media, and also interpersonal interaction.

We have, with, again, the assistance of IIP, created an office for the support of American Centers. In fact, we have the acting director over here, Anne Barbaro. And in working with IIP, we have also worked very, very hard for 18 months now, I think, to create a very good working relationship with our colleagues in Diplomatic Security and the Overseas Building Operations Bureau.

Why? Because we have sought, and I think are gradually achieving, an all-of-department approach to these spaces. DS clearly we need as a partner as we – because one of the reasons, as you know, that many of these centers have been shuttered or called back or pulled back behind embassy gates is simply because of security concerns.

And what we have been doing with OBO is twofold. One, as posts are anticipating the construction of new embassy compounds or new consulate compounds, working with the mission, if it has been part of the planning discussion to think about bringing some of these centers and spaces back in with the rest of the mission, we’re simply asking people just to stop for a second and ask the question, is this a wise move in terms of our outreach, and, you know, is this absolutely necessary in terms of security?

Let me be clear: Under Secretary McHale says security trumps all. And if it is indicated that these facilities must be brought – relocated or brought behind a fortified line of some sort, she of course understands that. But I think what she’s asking is for people just to simply stop and think and consider this, consider whether or not the mission would be interested in coming in for what we call a co-location waiver, whether or not there is a circumstance in which that space could be apart from the mission offices and such.

And we’ve had some good luck. We’ve had a couple of waivers granted in the past year, one in Ouagadougou I recall. And, you know, others are coming in as our missions – and this is, again, an all-of-missions thing – the chief of mission must sign off on these requests – as missions decide, you know, whether or not they’d like to make the request for a co-location waiver.

The issue here is the legal requirement that all U.S. diplomatic offices abroad be collocated on a single embassy compound in the principal place of USG business in that city. You can read all about it here, in 12 FAM 300. The requirement is invoked whenever a new embassy office facility is constructed or acquired.

(By the way, "collocation" is the correct spelling of the word, with two "l"s and no hyphen, although it is almost always misspelled as "co-location." That misspelling is my pet peeve, and correcting it is my lost cause.)

The collocation requirement may be waived, and so the R Bureau routinely puts up a fight to keep public diplomacy outreach facilities outside whenever new embassy compounds are planned. The position as Ms. Whitaker stated it, i.e., that the Department ought to consider waiving the collocation requirement on a case-by-case basis, is impeccably reasonable. This is basic risk management. The program benefits of making public diplomacy facilities easily accessible to the public can, in a rational world, be articulated and weighed against the security risks, and the increased security costs, of having a comparatively 'soft target' official facility in an annex across town from a new embassy compound.

Let the Ambassador make the request, and let the Secretary decide. Everyone signs on the dotted line, and accountability is established. Fair enough.

My personal interest in this matter is only indirectly with public diplomacy, in that I liked the old independent American Libraries and think they ought to be brought back into the mix of PD platforms, but I am directly interested in good risk management. As the wise man who hired me for my first job in DS said when he gave me the Foreign Affairs Handbook that contained our security standards: "These are the standards, but, of course, they have to be applied by reasoning human beings." I have always tried to apply reason to them, and I find they are much more persuasive that way.

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Mo' Better Fortresses

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We all hate those Fortress Embassies, don't we? Well, some of our diplomatic premises aren't nearly fortress-y enough but, in general, yes, we all hate them.

So it was good news when the Office of Overseas Buildings Operations met with its Industry Advisory Panel yesterday, and then sent out a press release about how it is exploring ways to design less fortress-y embassies. This is all part of the Design Excellence initiative that is slowly replacing OBO's established practice of standardized embassy design.

Here's the press release. Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations Introduces New Perimeter Design Concepts for Diplomatic Facilities:

The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) announced the new Embassy Perimeter Improvement Concepts (EPIC) initiative during its Industry Advisory Panel meeting today. The EPIC team studied compound perimeter designs to improve the quality and appeal of the built environment surrounding United States diplomatic facilities abroad. The EPIC initiative [see a summary here] is one of many efforts OBO is undertaking in its renewed commitment to Design Excellence.

OBO and the Bureau of Diplomatic Security collaborated with Davis Brody Bond Aedas, Rhodeside & Harwell, and Weidlinger Associates to observe and document the perimeters of four existing embassy compounds. After analyzing the function and aesthetic realities of perimeter designs, the team developed a range of alternate approaches to achieving mandated security requirements.

The goal of EPIC is to design new embassy perimeters that present a more positive and welcoming image of the United States abroad, while meeting all perimeter security standards and the functional needs of these facilities.

Design Excellence, implemented in 2010, is a holistic approach to building U.S. diplomatic missions abroad. Using the Guiding Principles of Design Excellence in Diplomatic Facilities as a road map, Design Excellence furthers OBO’s mission to provide safe, secure, and functional facilities that represent American values and the best in American architecture, engineering, technology, sustainability, art, culture, and construction execution.

OBO has gotten away from the standard embassy design a couple times in recent years to do one-offs, most notably in Beijing. See some photos of that Unfortress Embassy here, and an artist's rendering from the embassy's website, below.













Wow. All that glass, water features, fancy landscaping, and cultural sensitivity. What's not to like? No Fortress there. Why not do more of those?

Here's my take-away from OBO's Design Excellence guidance and how it might affect future embassy construction:

-- Urban site selection for most new buildings. We can expect to see taller chancery buildings on smaller plots of land closer to the urban core. At least, we can expect that in those cities where OBO doesn't need to provide on-compound amenities like dining and recreation facilities, or on-compound housing. For the worst of the Third World, and for the highest-threat posts, big compounds in - necessarily - remote locations will continue to be needed.

-- Representational (not just functional) embassy buildings that are fitted into the surrounding architectural environment. No more Big Box diplo-kitsch productions that all come from the same template.

-- Grounds and landscaping will be an important part of the design. They will no longer be ignored, value-engineered away, or left for the regional bureau to pay for later. I could rant a little here about one of this year's new construction projects in which the entire compound is landscaped with a foot-deep cover of loose rock that looks like a barren moonscape, can't be safely walked on, soaks up solar heat until it feels like a frying pan, makes it impossible to establish a helicopter landing zone for emergency evacuations, and would become secondary fragmentation in the event of a bomb attack. I could rant about that, but I'm trying to ease up about it.

-- A higher value will be placed on selecting excellent designers (“seek to hire the highest quality American architects and engineers”), as opposed to hiring anyone willing to sign a firm fixed price contract for less than the next guy.

-- Designs will take lifecycle analysis into account, thereby reducing long-term costs for operations and maintenance.

-- Historical, cultural, and architectural legacy buildings will be preserved. OBO does this now, however, I hope it will more fully develop adaptive work-arounds for meeting security requirements, especially perimeter security requirements, in protected cultural properties. I see no reason why such buildings can't be preserved both in the cultural sense and in the literal sense of being preserved from destruction by mobs and vehicle bombs.

-- OBO will seek the best value when contracting. The guidance states that "current [OBO] policy emphasizes low first cost at the expense of design quality and lifecycle costs." Indeed, it does. They can admit that kind of thing now that General Williams isn’t around.

Come to think of it, General Williams has been gone for almost four years. What took OBO so long to shake off his influence?

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U.S. Embassy Bandar Seri Begawan, On The Cutting Edge Of Diplomatic Water Efficiency

(Photo from embassy website.)








OBO (the Office of Overseas Buildings Operations) cut another ribbon this week, this time on the 84th new building to be completed under the capital security construction program. That program is a tragic legacy of the 1999 Embassy Bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

Here's the press release. United States Dedicates New Embassy in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam:

Occupying a 5.3-acre site in the Diplomatic Enclave, the new Embassy compound replaces the prior facility in the Teck Guan Plaza building located in downtown Bandar Seri Begawan.

The new Embassy compound incorporates several sustainable features, most notably an irrigation system that utilizes Brunei Darussalam’s abundant natural rain. The facility is registered with the U.S. Green Building Council, and will be submitted for certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) green building rating system.

-- snip --

OBO’s mission is to provide safe, secure, and functional facilities for the conduct of U.S. diplomacy and the promotion of U.S. interests worldwide. These facilities should represent American values and the best in American architecture, engineering, technology, sustainability, art, culture, and construction execution.

The local press in Brunei has some more on that LEED® green building sustainability stuff:

According to Mr Evans, the Managing Director for the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operation (OBO) Construction, Facility and Security Management Directorate, "The new embassy is registered with the US Green Building Council and will be submitted for certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building rating system. The building uses advance irrigation system that utilises natural rainwater, waterless urinal as well as energy efficient lightings in the building.

Waterless what now? Urinals? Yes, and you can expect to see them coming to an embassy office building near you because waterless urinals play a major part in OBO's initiative on water efficiency:

Indoor strategies that OBO incorporates include low-flow plumbing fixtures, faucet aerators, dual flush toilets and waterless urinals. OBO further supports posts with a waterless urinal replacement program for older, more water-intensive plumbing fixtures in facilities that demonstrate high consumption and high cost.

I kind of understand how those waterless devices work, with a liquid sealant vapor block and so forth. Still, I find the whole concept a bit disconcerting. Would it really be asking too much for a little water to flush that bad boy? Considering that Brunei has 7.5 feet of "abundant natural rain" annually, compared to just 2.5 feet for the United States, why are we going to extremes to save a little water there?

I like LEED®-green-sustainable-ecological-efficient building design as much as anybody, but, please, how about a little more concern for the microclimate inside the men's room?

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Another Ribbon Cut, Another Fortress Embassy Opened

The Office of Overseas Buildings Operations is on a roll, dedicating a second new embassy compounds in as many weeks, this one in Lusaka, Zambia.

Here's the press release:

Reflecting the importance of the United States’ diplomatic relationship with Zambia, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Johnnie Carson dedicated the new United States Embassy compound in Zambia today. Zambian President, Rupiah B. Banda and First President of the Republic of Zambia, Kenneth D. Kaunda, and U.S. Ambassador to Zambia, Mark C. Storella and Managing Director of the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations, Jay Hicks attended the ribbon cutting ceremony.

The new Embassy on Ibex Hill was designed to incorporate unique architectural features that showcase elements of Zambia. It also integrates green building techniques and has been registered with the U.S. Green Building Council for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) certification. The multi-building complex provides more than 350 U.S. embassy employees, both American and Zambian, with over 13,000 square meters of working space.

B.L. Harbert International of Birmingham, Alabama constructed the facility under a design/build contract; the architectural firm of Einhorn Yaffee Prescott designed the facility. The $126 million project generated jobs in both the United States and Zambia. The new facility was completed in October 2010 and at times involved more than 1,200 workers in its construction.

Since the 1999 enactment of the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act, the Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) has moved more than 22,000 people into safer facilities. Including the dedication of the new Embassy in Lusaka, OBO has completed 77 diplomatic facilities and has an additional 33 projects in design or construction.

Now, the question on my mind is how many of those 350 employees can fit inside the new cafeteria at the same time. Is it as ridiculously small as the one in Addis Ababa?

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